Wilmington, NC News

Archive for February, 2013

An SBI bomb squad and special agents are at a storage facility on Carolina Beach Road and Sanders Road. A mandatory evacuation for S&P Town Center and Strickland Surplus was issued just before 3:00 Thursday afternoon.

WILMINGTON, NC (WWAY) — FBI and SBI agents have detonated a second suspicious package found at a storage facility on Carolina Beach Road. Earlier today another package exploded as a bomb robot shot at it as agents tried to figure out what was in it.

The FBI and the SBI are conducting an investigation at North State Storage on Carolina Beach Road south of Monkey Junction. Law enforcement has ordered a mandatory evacuation for businesses around North State Storage on the east side of Carolina Beach Road as they continue to investigate.

New Hanover County Sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. Jerry Brewer says it started this morning when the FBI began dealing with a suspicious package. Brewer says the FBI was investigating a suspect, which led them to the storage unit. They used a robot to shoot the package, at which point the package exploded. It’s not clear if they shot it with water or live ammunition, but agents did not expect it to explode.

Brewer says agents are still dealing with one more suspicious package they found in the storage unit. They do not know what is in the package, but they are X-raying it to decide if they’ll need to detonate it. The bomb squad did the same thing to the most recently detonated package. They buried it before exploding it.

Spokeswomen for the FBI and SBI confirm their agents and the SBI bomb squad are on scene connected to an investigation being handled by the FBI. A SBI spokeswoman says all its agents are at the single location, despite an earlier report from another Wilmington TV station that the SBI was at another location in a neighborhood farther down Carolina Beach Road.

A witness called WWAY around 12:45 p.m. and said he saw a bomb unit at North State, which is at the intersection of Sanders Road, and heard an explosion coming from the property a few minutes earlier. A New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office spokesman confirmed a small explosion. He referred us to the FBI and SBI.

The Wilmington Police Department’s bomb unit is also on scene to assist.